LONDON - Murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was killed because of an eight-page dossier he had compiled on a powerful Russian figure for a British company, a business associate told the BBC on Saturday.

Litvinenko died in London on November 23 after receiving a lethal dose of radioactive polonium 210. On his deathbed, he accused Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering his killing. The Kremlin has denied involvement.

Ex-spy Yuri Shvets, who is based in the United States, said Litvinenko had been employed by Western companies to provide information on potential Russian clients before they committed to investment deals in the former Soviet Union.

He said Litvinenko was asked by a British company to write reports on five Russians and asked Shvets for help. The British company was not named. Shvets said he had passed Litvinenko the information for the dossier on one individual in September.

The BBC said it had obtained extracts of the dossier, which British detectives also have, from an unnamed source. The BBC said the report contained damaging personal details about a "very highly placed member of Putin's administration."

"Litvinenko obtained the report on September 20," Shvets told the BBC. "Within the next two weeks he gave the report to Andrei Lugovoy. I believe that triggered the entire assassination."

Lugovoy is a former Russian spy who told Reuters on Thursday he had known Litvinenko casually for nearly a decade and had worked closely with him during 2005, meeting him about 10 times.

Shvets said Litvinenko had given the dossier to Lugovoy to show him how reports on Russian companies and individuals should be presented to Western clients.

However, Shvets said he believed Lugovoy was still employed by the Russian secret service the FSB, the successor to the KGB, and had leaked Litvinenko's dossier to the Russian figure.

Shvets said the report had led to the British company pulling out of a deal, losing the Russian figure potential earnings of "dozens of millions of dollars."

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Lugovoy and businessman Dmitry Kovtun met Litvinenko at a central London hotel, soon after he had met Italian KGB expert Mario Scaramella at a sushi bar. Litvinenko felt ill that night and two days later was admitted to hospital.

"Litvinenko told me he met Lugovoy and other Russians and they offered him tea that wasn't made in front of him, said Shvets.

Lugovoy told Reuters in an interview that he met Litvinenko in October and November but he has repeatedly denied having anything to do with his death.

Litvinenko never blamed Lugovoy publicly for his murder before dying in the London hospital. However, Shvets said he had come around to that possibility.

"I asked Litvenenko who did you think did it?" Shvets told the BBC. "He immediately said Scaramella. For three days he stubbornly reiterated it was Scaramella and only on the fourth day did he admit he met Lugovoy and other Russians.

"I stopped communicating with Litvinenko when it was diagnosed he had been poisoned. But I spoke to his wife and she told me Litvinenko shared my opinion," Shvets told the BBC.

The BBC said senior Scotland Yard officers had interviewed Shvets.

France has deployed a total of 2,000 troops in Afghanistan, with the remainder serving in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Seven members of the French special forces have been killed in action in the war-ravaged country, while 12 others have been wounded since their deployment.

ISAF which took command from the US-led troops last month has more than 30,000 troops while 10,000 US-led coalition troops are on the hunt for Al-Qaeda and Taliban remnants.

The French special forces contingent is currently based in eastern Nangarhar province.

Despite being ousted from power, remnants of Taliban and other Islamist allies including those from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network are still waging a bloody insurgency in parts of the country.

Nearly 4,000 people, many of them rebels, have died this year in the insurgency, which has entered its bloodiest phase since the toppling of the Taliban. The regime was ousted following the World Trade Center attacks for failing to hand over bin Laden to US authorities.

The proposed French withdrawal comes when ISAF commanders facing an unexpected Taliban resistance have been demanding more troops to be deployed in the south of Afghanistan where Taliban are most active.

Jean-Marie Le Pen is on holiday. The veteran French far right-wing leader is taking a final break before the gruelling political marathon he hopes will take him, if not into the Elysee Palace, at least into the second round of the presidential elections next spring.

In his absence it is his daughter, Marine, 38, who is the face of the party. At her office in the Front National (FN) headquarters in the west Paris suburb of St Cloud, Marine Le Pen explained the idea behind the new, controversial poster campaign launched last week, which, for the first time, does not highlight the beefy features of her father, but features a woman of apparent immigrant origin.

'For 30 years we have defended the interests of the French people, where ever they come from, whatever their race or religion,' she said. 'The idea of the posters is to put the French people in the foreground, not the candidate. We want to give them back the voice they have been denied by the political elite.'

The strategy is working. Poll results published in Le Monde late last week showed the FN at its highest levels of support for years, even better than in the run-up to the 2002 election where it polled 18 per cent and went through to the two-candidate run-off of the second round. In 1997 nearly half of French people saw Le Pen's ideas as unacceptable; now only a third do. 'People are getting used to Le Pen and his ideas. They are becoming banal,' said Emmanuel Riviere, of pollsters TNS Sofres. Marine says this is only natural: 'People are only surprised because we have been caricatured for so many years. Now they are learning the truth. We have been seen as the devil for too long.' Truth for some, cynical marketing exercise for others. 'In France, we have a vulgar expression that you can't paint merde,' Le Pen, the youngest of former paratrooper Jean-Marie's three daughters, said. She was referring to the efforts of what she called political elites to 'cover up' the state of France's economic and social problems. Yet her phrase could equally be applied, critics say, to the FN itself.

Marine Le Pen is at the spearhead of a radical attempt to change the image of her party. A 300-page autobiography Against the Flow, appearances in French media, a diet, a personal makeover as well as a new 'moderate' language have all led to new prominence for the former lawyer, divorcee and mother of three children. Her father is 78, contesting his sixth election, and everyone is aware that the time to pass the torch is not far away. Marine Le Pen is now, despite opposition from within the party and despite her own denials, best placed for the succession.

'All extremist parties have a problem with what to do when the chief goes,' said Frederic Dabi, public opinion expert at pollsters Ifop. 'Marine Le Pen has built herself a popular base that is far from negligible.'

A new chapter in the Le Pen family saga is opening. For it is indeed a saga - or a soap opera, according to critics. 'There is a real Dallas side to that family,' said Lorrain de Saint-Affrique, a former public relations adviser to the FN. 'The members detest each other but always reconcile their differences in the end.'

Le Pen, his second wife, two of his daughters - including Marine - and their children share a mansion and five-hectare estate near the FN office. Daughter Marie-Caroline was ostracised from the party and the family when the FN split in the late 1990s, and she sided with her father's rival. Now she has returned, more or less, to the fold. Relations between Marine and her father have not always been straightforward either.

'Like any family we have had our difficulties but we sort them out,' she told The Observer. 'The attacks against us have made us very close. There have been bombs; the divorce of my parents was all over the media.

'As a child, at school, I was the daughter of the devil for many. But we are a tribe and we stick together.' Always a very physical presence in French politics, the 'grandfather' of the European far right is toning down his rhetoric, taking care to avoid slip-ups such as his infamous dismissal of Nazi gas chambers as 'a detail of history,' a description of the German occupation of France as 'relatively humane', or a complaint before the 1998 World Cup that the French football team was not white enough.

And though their in-house literature makes much of it, the continuing trial of the FN's delegate general for Holocaust denial does not feature in public statements by Le Pen or his daughter either. Instead, as well as less talk about the 'immigration torrent' or 'France for the French', there are many pronouncements about the failure of the 'auto-proclaimed political-media elite' to represent honest, ordinary Frenchmen and women, of the failure of French democracy, of the collapse of French schools and other institutions, and of the two greatest bogeymen now inhabiting the French popular political landscape - threats of globalisation and 'Anglo Saxon' ultra-liberal economic systems.

'The most revealing statistic in recent months was a poll that showed that half of French people believe they could end up as homeless on the street.

'That is the depth of the anxiety of our compatriots,' Marine Le Pen said. 'The French people are asking themselves if there is an alternative to the traditional parties. And that is our chance.' The problem for the FN in the wake of the 2002 elections was that, though it had polled more than five million votes, it failed to break into the mainstream. With no MPs or even mayors, it has no formal presence in the French political system.

'They saw that they were stuck on around 20 per cent of the vote,' said Jean-Yves Camus, author of Extremism in France. 'From then on, they knew that they needed to find new themes and an image that would allow them to reach out to new voters.'

Some of those new voters are coming from surprising directions. One controversial visitor at a recent Le Pen rally was a comic whose 'jokes' about Jews have provoked a series of legal actions. Radical fringe elements claiming to represent popular sentiment in the poor suburbs around Paris have also expressed support for 'the new Front National'.

But that does not mean that the new strategy is working, at least not yet. 'Our surveys show that France is not a more xenophobic or more intolerant place than it was a year ago. And women are particularly resistant to Le Pen,' said Riviere. Analysts also point out that a vote for a Le Pen is very often a protest vote. 'The majority of voters who vote FN do not actually want to see Le Pen in the Elysee palace,' said Pascal Perrineau, director of political research at Sciences-Polytechnic University in Paris.

A key test will be the success or failure of Le Pen to gather the 500 mayoral signatures he needs to stand in a presidential election. At the moment, the FN is struggling to secure firm promises from mayors not yet convinced that the new image of the party will protect them from a grassroots backlash.

Marine Le Pen blames the 'manipulation' of the process by the political establishment. This is another example of France's 'dysfunctional democracy,' she says.

The younger Le Pen is proud of having organised the launch of the party's 2007 election campaign with a rally at Valmy, the revolutionary battlefield where the rag-tag footsoldiers of the young French Republic were victorious against all odds against their monarchic foreign enemies in 1792. In the end, it is at the lowest, individual level, where moral and motivation and ideas count most, that campaigns, military or political, are won or lost. The devil is in the detail.

Who's that girl?

With her pierced lip, low-cut jeans and, according to the Front National leaders, 'immigrant origins', she has caused a media stir.

From the party that had complained viciously about immigrants for 30 years - and whose words had been translated into action by some people - the poster appears to be a major shift. In front of the words nationality, assimilation, social mobility and the secular state, each a traditional value of the French Republic, appears the slogan: 'The right and the left have ruined everything.'

Party officials are coy over the exact identity of the girl shown in the poster, admitting that she is neither a front activist nor a member and saying only that she agreed to pose for the campaign and was - like the far more typical figures who posed in the other posters - promised anonymity.

The other images for the campaign are closer to those traditionally associated with Le Pen and the Front National. A teenager in front of the words 'school, identity, future'. A middle-aged woman clutching a dog, before 'retirement, social security, protection'.

'You vote for Le Pen like you choose a brand,' said Dominique Reynie, a political scientist. 'It's always the same promise: a political earthquake.'

Of all the temptations of journalism, prediction is the most dangerous. Soothsayers in our trade are usually made to look foolish by events. The best answer was given by the fabled correspondent in some distant spot who, asked by an importunate foreign desk (in the days of abbreviated cablese) to file "soonest,fullest,whatnext happens", responded succinctly: "Myballs uncrystal."

After that, let me say something simply and confidently: Turkey is not going to join the EU. "Not" does not mean "never" but in any foreseeable future, although you wouldn't know that from Tony Blair. He visited Turkey last Friday at the beginning of his latest forlorn, not to say fantastical, mission to bring peace to the Middle East, intoning the words: "It is important that we continue the process of accession with Turkey."

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Nor would you know it from other exalted Euro-personages. Chancellor Angela Merkel has just joined the Social Democrats, her German coalition partners, in saying that full membership "would be worthwhile", one fine day. Erkki Tuomioja, the Finnish foreign minister, whose country's EU presidency is just coming to an end, says that "the door is still open", while Carl Bildt, the foreign minister, continues ardently to favour Turkish membership.

All these pious hopes are expressed at the very moment negotiations between Turkey and the EU have just hit one more pothole, with Brussels suspending talks as a punishment for Ankara's refusal to open its ports and airports to Greek Cyprus. This suspension was a "serious mistake", Blair says, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister calls it "unacceptable".

By now the Turks should have learned that there is much they must accept whether they like it or not, and they have come to feel, not without reason, that when one obstacle is surmounted Europe will always find another. Turkey became an associate member of the EEC or Common Market as long ago as 1963, and in 1987 Ankara applied for full membership of the EU.

During the lengthy interlude came the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974 and in 1983 the creation of a Turkish Cypriot state, which no one but Ankara recognises. Turkey has a much better case over Cyprus than in other matters, and the despicable behaviour of the Greek Cypriot government - and electorate, when they voted against the reunification of the island once EU membership could not be revoked - has made Cyprus the least loved member state of the EU.

More serious objections are the patchy Turkish record (to put it mildly) on human rights. Turkey still does not enjoy what European countries consider a true rule of law or freedom of speech, and has not come to terms with its history, notably the fate of the Armenians.

Even then, the continual European hesitancy and changing of the tune might suggest bad faith. But that is not really so, and a better way of seeing it is as a kind of social embarrassment. Far from having embarked on an elaborate deception, Europe said something with good intentions but without really thinking it through, only to recognise slowly how grave the practical difficulties are. As a result, Turkey waits for church bells that never ring, while Europe, as one French diplomat puts it, is like a man with a mistress he doesn't want to lose, but doesn't want to marry, either. The trouble is that a moment passes, after which it's no longer easy or even possible to say this thing can work without causing pain.

For their part, the worst mistake the Turks have made is invoking US support. During yet another crisis between Ankara and Brussels a little more than a year ago, Erdogan rang Condoleezza Rice and asked for her help, to which the secretary of state duly responded by expressing yet again Washington's ardent support for Turkish admission to the EU - and thereby further enraging the Europeans.

As usual Blair takes the American line, arguing for Turkish admission on strategic grounds: it "has an importance not just in respect to Turkey but with wider relationships between the west and the Muslim world". Shutting the door will alienate Muslims everywhere, letting Turkey in will build a bridge between the west and the Islamic world.

But another way of putting it is that Europe is being asked to make a huge sacrifice to gratify American strategic interests. Whatever Blair may think, this doesn't meet with universal favour. As the former European commissioner Chris Patten has sarcastically said, it is very good of the Americans to keep offering Turkey admission to the EU, but this is a question on which Europeans might want to have some say themselves.

Neither Blair nor his American friends have noticed that there has scarcely been a less propitious moment for Turkish admission in these 40 years. Turkish sensitivity about being excluded from a "Christian club" is quite misplaced: Europe today isn't a Christian anything, and even fear of radical Islamism is not the main factor. More important is the hangover from previous EU expansion - and the Turkish question also illustrates the gulf between "the soi-disant elites", as that contrarian French politician Jean-Pierre Chevènement calls them, personified by Blair, Tuomioja and Bildt, and the actual peoples of Europe.

In May 2004, eastern European countries that had been sundered from their neighbours by 60 years of war and cold war were admitted to "our common European home" and very moving it was. After the elation, Europe woke up to realise that its 10 new member states now comprised a quarter of its population while providing a 20th of its economic product, and that's before Romania and Bulgaria join in the new year, let alone Turkey, with a per-capita income one-tenth of the British, and a child mortality rate 10 times the French.

A year later, the French and Dutch referendums, which turned down the new EU constitution, were a hostile response to that expansion, and by implication to Turkish admission. For all Blair's high-sounding platitudes, that new mood has been caught by other European politicians. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French interior minister who is almost certain to be the conservative candidate - and favourite - in May's presidential elections, is an open opponent of Turkish membership, and is "happy to see that these ideas are gaining ground". As he might say, building bridges between the west and Islam, and sapping the roots of terrorism, are doubtless worthy objectives, but since when did they become the purpose of the EU?

In the end, the problem is less cultural or economic or religious than simply geographical. This is something we have only slowly woken up to, but it explains why Turkey will not join for a very long time, if ever. Bildt says, solemnly and dubiously, that "there is no doubt that Turkey is a part of Europe", but a French politician has put it another way: can we really have a Europe that extends to the borders of Iraq? Many ordinary Europeans seem to know the answer to that better than their rulers.